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Comment by zionic | Hacker News Reader

How is PoS easier to censor than PoW, specificity ETH 2.0’s implementation.

Yeah, the most obvious externality of an ethereum validator is a few megabits of sustained internet traffic that makes it difficult to run on capped internet services. Otherwise it is just a matter of being able to buy the eth, setting up the node (cheap commodity pc hardware) and putting it in a corner in your home.

In contrast for POW you have to be able to source specialized hardware and an electricity supply cheap enough to make the hardware profitable, both of which are much more noticable to the outside world.

The censorship doesn't happen at the network level but at the protocol level, by removing a validators stake.

Which would either require an in protocol slashing event or a hard fork. In which case the fork with the broadest legitamacy would prevail (see the events around the Steem/Hive hard fork). Blockchains cannot escape being fundamentally social creatures with values and priorities and the communities around those chains will ultimately have the last word about their operation.

I'm not sure what your point is. Obviously it would require a protocol change, and such a change can't be done with fungible work.

The first way is that it's subjective; you have to trust the initial source of the data to give you the correct validator set to use layer. This is a vector for censoring some stake.

The second, probably more important way, is that validators in PoS can decide to ignore or slash a particular validators stake. This can't be done in PoW because the hashes are fungible and stake is not.

AFAIK, the PoS in ethereum is structured that it is extremely hard to ignore a stake (you're vulnerable to slashing if you do), and that you are only vulnerable to slashing if you cheat (not if you are merely offline, at which point you just forego any rewards). Counteracting this requires a similar or greater amount than a PoW chain would require for similar effects (where a 51% attack can also simply refuse to build off of a particular miners blocks, thus effectively stopping their reward).

Vitalik Buterin : stop all trading!! Reverse the chain!

Its okay if we control all the supply because we have it in the premine to our friends and they have the best interest in keeping Ethereum safe.

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